The two editors had sorted about 200 or so poems into three categories:
A: Those “of most original thought” and “in the best form.”
B: Those with “striking ideas” but “with too many of her peculiarities of construction.”
C: Those considered “too obscure” or “too irregular in form.”
In their letters to one another about the process, Higginson mentioned two poems in particular to include: “Glee! The great storm is over” and "I know some lonely house off the road” (“we must have that burglary” wrote Higginson).
I posted both of those poems yesterday, and I wondered how much editing Todd and Higginson did on them to ready them for their publication. With some of the poems, they changed words, lines and stanzas; for example in “Because I could not stop for Death,” Todd and Higginson altered lines and rhymes and even omitted an entire stanza – so with these two poems, I was curious to see what might have been changed.
In “Glee – The great storm is over,” Todd and Higginson did change “urge” to “ask” in the third stanza, but “ask” was an alternate word choice considered by Dickinson. In the same stanza they changed “story” to “shipwreck,” but I’m not sure if that word was considered a possibility by the poet.
In the final line – to correct the subject-verb agreement – they changed “Sea” to “waves” to keep the rhyme of “reply” with “eye” (had they stuck with “Sea,” they would have had to change “reply” to “replies”).